3 Things Your Smartphone Use Says About You

Ever feel like from your emails to your calls to your web history, your whole life is on your mobile phone?

You could be right. Lately, psychology researchers have been looking at what they can learn about you by looking at your smartphone, and it turns out the answer is: a lot. Here are 3 things people’s mobile phone usage predicts about them.

1. Mood

Researchers at Taipei City Hospital built an app that predicts your mood based on your phone activity.

To test the app, they had 18 people run it on their phones for two weeks and periodically enter tags describing their emotional states. The program looked for patterns between how people were feeling and how they were using their phones.

After two weeks of watching people’s phone activity, the app then started predicting what tags they would use to describe their emotions. It guessed correctly 86 percent of the time.

In other words, people have distinct patterns of smartphone usage associated with different moods, although those patterns aren’t necessarily the same from one person to the next.

2. Romantic Intimacy

In some research published this month, 128 participants were asked to fill out surveys related to their smartphone multitasking habits, levels of smartphone life interference and levels of romantic intimacy. They were asked to fill out each survey twice – once for themselves and once for their partners.

When all the questionnaires had been completed, it turned out that people who rated their partners higher on smartphone multitasking reported less romantic intimacy. However, people’s ratings of their own phone usage didn’t affect their romantic intimacy scores.

This finding confirms something that goes without saying: your smartphone usage isn’t a problem at all. Your partner’s, on the other hand…

3. Delayed Gratification

Are you addicted to texting?

No, I mean that literally. Researchers sometimes measure what they call “texting dependence,” and recently they put their texting dependence questionnaires to the test to try to figure out what kind of people are more likely to develop patterns of unhealthy and excessive texting and smartphone usage.

What they found was that people who report more excessive texting, texting-related psychological and behavioral symptoms, excessive iPod use, and iPod-related relationship problems also tend to be worse at delaying gratification – or, to put it another way, tend to see future rewards as much less important than immediate ones.

If you ask me, it’s interesting that there’s a correlation between mobile phone usage and delayed gratification, but the most surprising finding here is that some people still use iPods.